Description

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, and a Research Assistant at the Computer Graphics and Visualization Lab, where I currently work with Prof. Daniel Aliaga.

From February to July, 2010, I will be an academic guest at the Chair for Information Architecture at ETH Zürich and an intern at Procedural Inc., both in Switzerland.

My research is focused on procedural methods for fast design and editing of 3D urban models. Modeling the appearance and behavior of urban spaces is a great challenge for computer graphics and urban simulation, due to the size and detail of urban structures, and the complex socioeconomic rules that determine the evolution of a city. These two disciplines have traditionally worked in isolation, in spite of the many applications to which they are both relevant, including urban planning, emergency response, mapping, visualization, and entertainment.

My goal is to show that a concurrent behavioral and geometrical simulation significantly benefits the design, editing, and prediction of large-scale 3D urban models by (i) inferring the values for multiple parameters and decision choices which in turn reduces design time, (ii) enforcing the 3D generation process to produce models that behaviorally and geometrically resemble plausible real-world cities, and (iii) augmenting the simulation to consider changes in the urban landscape geometry resulting in improved simulation accuracy over long time horizons and in more simulated urban phenomena.